Excerpt:
“Come in.” They did not speak the
clan tongue in front of Outsiders, not without dire need, lest
someone overhear enough to translate it and learn it. Instead, they
spoke Shappan, the dominant language of Tilzam. Nearly everyone knew
it, regardless of country or native tongue. Along with the words,
spoken in the light accent of the clan, she lifted a hand to gesture
to the stool opposite herself. “You are welcome here.”
He was timid as a mouse and small like
one, too. Keino could probably lift this man over his head with one
hand, or break him in half over his knee. Chavali watched him take
small steps and dart his eyes all around. “Um, you’re the Seer?”
His Shappan was obviously better than her own, she could tell even
with so few words spoken.
“Yes. No one can see into the tent,
it is safe, you are safe here. Sit, be calm.” Coaxing a scared
little man onto the seat was not her preferred way to spend her time,
and she stifled a sigh and a roll of her eyes. “If you do not sit,
I cannot help, yes?”
“Oh, right. Of course.” He moved
quickly, practically jumped onto the stool while shooting terrified
looks all around the tent. “I’ve just never done anything like
this before, and, um, I’m worried about…”
Holding out her hand, she kept her tone
calm and patient. “Give me your hand. I cannot help if I have no
connection to you.”
His
audible gulp made her want to roll her eyes again, but he tentatively
offered her his hand. As she seized it, the spirits rushed him, eager
as always for new people to interact with.
DearCreatorIhopeyoucanhelpmeI’mdoomedthisissocrazy
“Calm,” she told him, shutting her
eyes to make it easier to focus on this pile of crap. “If you do
not calm down, I see nothing, just a bouncing jumble of nervous. Deep
breath in through your mouth, out through your nose. Come, do this a
few times.”
His thoughts began to settle as he
followed her orders. It became less a rushed mush and more actual
coherent ideas. Amy is going to kill me for this. I shouldn’t
be doubting her, but I am, and I need to fix that. She’s a sweet
girl, this is all my fault.
“I see a name. A-something, Anna? No,
Amy. Does this name mean something to you?”
As expected, he gasped a little. How
does she know that? Is this the real thing? If she knows that, she
must know if she’s seeing Marcus or not. “Yes, that’s my
wife.”
“You worry about her, you think she
is meeting someone else?”
“Yes!” His mind flooded with images
of Amy, who he loved, deeply, but also with images of a man much more
virile than himself. That other man wore armor and used a blade for
his work. A city guard, perhaps, or a soldier.
“There is another name, with a…’c’.
But not at the front, maybe in the end? No, no, the middle. Arcu,
Marcus. Yes, Marcus. He wields authority.”
“Yes, he’s in the Order of the
Strong Arm, one of their knights. I need to know.” He already knew,
of course. That was the beauty of what Chavali did. All the answers
were in his mind already, he just needed someone else to say it out
loud because he couldn’t, the poor fool. People really were the
same no matter where she went.
Still, it wasn’t good to just say
things like this aloud with no feeling or props, or anything to give
her an air of more authority than just pulling things out of the air.
Her free hand dipped into the pouch tied to the thin belt around her
waist (it also held a small blade in a sheath at the small of her
back), pulled out five objects at random and tossed them on the
table. Keeping hold of his hand, she peered down at the bones,
finding it amusing that all five were actually bones. The pouch also
had crystals, stones, and even bits of shell and wood, all minimally
shaped and etched with ink-stained runes by her own hand.
It wasn’t that the bones were only
props - they had meaning for Chavali. It was that they weren’t
tools for divining. In this context, she used them as prompts, as
ideas for how to word things. “Mmm.” Starting with the one
closest to him, because she didn’t like having them out of her
control for any longer than necessary, she picked up a chicken wing
bone, displayed it, then deposited it back into her pouch. “Pain of
the soul, for you.” The next was a finger bone, from Seer Marika’s
dead body. “Betrayal. Face down, the betrayer is a woman.” A bone
from the paw of a dog was next. She liked that dog enough to preserve
a part of him. “Love, but face down, so actually just lust.”
This was all so stupid and predictable.
His mind raced as her words confirmed everything he feared. The next,
a horse’s tooth, was an amusing addition. “Secrets. Many
secrets.” The last one almost always turned up when she did this.
It was a chunk of unidentified bone, picked up some time ago just
because of its odd shape. “Fear. There is much fear through all of
this.”
She needed nothing more from this man
to make her pronouncement, and she didn’t care in the slightest if
it turned out to be true or not. They would be gone tomorrow morning,
and likely wouldn’t return for several years, if ever. Letting go
of his hand, she gave him a mildly sympathetic look. “The bones
have spoken. She has betrayed you, and you must deal with that in
your own way. The bones, I think, suggest you confront it head-on,
but this Marcus may not be wise to cross.”
He nodded, resigned. “Thank you.”
“It is not a thing I wish to be
thanked for. Good fortune to you.” She watched him get up and
leave, and snorted at him as soon as the tent flap was shut again.
Idiot. He was, of course, the first of today’s parade of idiots and
twits, each of them with a story as uninteresting as the next, a
story Chavali had heard dozens of times before.
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